I was on my way to Baruch on a Friday morning and I saw this enormous bag of rice right outside Chipotle (the one near Baruch). As I looked closer, I was even more shocked because I realized that it was bag full of nothing but just food. This could only mean one thing, it wasn’t even the customers who were being wasteful, but it was the staff who wasted all of the rice.
We all know that world hunger is an imminent issue that requires immediate attention, especially in African countries. We always try to analyze the economic implications behind the issue, which makes sense as the stagnant economies in third world countries are the main reasons of starvation, clean water sources, etc. After seeing this picture, perhaps we might need to shift our focus from what these countries need to what we don’t need. From food to electronics, clothing to water, we waste billions of tons of these valuable resources each day. Simply reducing our waste generation can substantially contribute to the solution.
I think this is an issue that has a lot to do with the mentality of our generation. Many people who have never faced poverty do not truly appreciate what they have and don’t put enough effort to utilize it properly because the food is viewed as expendable. My grandma used to tell me of her own mother who, like many other people of her time, would pick up bread that fell to the floor, blow on it, kiss it, and keep eating. She survived “Holodomor” a man-made Famine-Genocide that killed millions of Ukrainians in the 1930s. To people like her throwing out food was a sin.
I think that in order to prevent people from wasting food we have to raise awareness about countries that are facing poverty and remind people of the famine that causes masses to die, simply because they don’t have what we so carelessly dispose of. It is morally wrong to overutilize food. Wrong towards those starving, and wrong towards our future generations.
The value of a resource could be seen in everything and is not up to us to waste them. I think that garbage really shows what people have no use for and what is really considered to be garbage needs to change and with that a change in an idealism. People need to learn what effect wasting and underutilizing an object really does. Love the pic and analyzing it!!!!